A Handful of Dust (Penguin Modern Classics)

There are two major problems that I had suspending belief for this story, although when it does work it is classic Waugh and very entertaining: acerbic, satirical and quite funny.

Firstly, he does not endeavour to explain why, although I wouldn't need much convincing that things like this happen in real life, a seemingly very happily married woman in her early thirties who is still very much in love with her husband,has a child, lives in a country manor, and is generally of sound mind would undertake an affair with the character John Beaver who is made out as much as possible at the beginning of the book to be a social leper without any redeeming features or, indeed, much money either. There was no seam so to speak of when suddenly a few pages in Lady Last has taken up with this miserable one-dimensional social pariah for absolutely no reason at all, at least not a reason that I could make out.

Secondly, once again, we have someone acting completely out of character. As Mark Twain said (I'm quite sure):"The difference between truth and fiction is that fiction has to make sense". But to me, this laconic, laid back country squire suddenly taking off down the Amazon because his wife is having an affair really just seemed like an excuse for Waugh to finish off a fine story by employing some of his travel experiences. English Gothic indeed! Before we know it we are in the land of Paul Bowles, dark forests, disease, fever and inhospitable tribes. I had to keep reminding myself I was reading the same book, this really was going off on a tangent. I understand that 'The Man Who Likes Dickens' was originally a short story for an American magazine, it should have been left thus and not tacked on to the end of this book. It's a great shame, almost similar to what lets down Vile Bodies, Waugh getting divorced halfway through writing the book and when he returned to it the dynamic was lost.

Apart from that, well worth reading!


And that dust is golden   November 27, 2002
13 out of 13 found this review helpful

Waugh was a wine critic with no equal. He is a satirist with no equal. His eye for social detail could not be crisper, his tongue could not be sharper. At times he will have you writhing with laughter; at times he will have you crying in pain.
As with much of Waugh's work his own life is a weighty influence. What distinguishes this novel from his earlier work is the heavy undercurrent that permeates thoughout. The title of the work is taken from T.S. Eliot's seminal modernist work 'The Waste Land', and that is precisely what Waugh sets out to describe. Although the humour follows on through Waugh's work, this is not the light-hearted jaunt through English polite society of 'Vile Bodies'. On occasion 'A Handful of Dust' is dark and damning.
That said, the work is highly amusing in places. Such a marriage of humour and despair might seem improbable if not impossible. It would be for rank-and-file satirists. Waugh is a class apart.